Hope all of you are doing well and training smart. Nikki and I were progressing very well in our RKC Level II Training in the past few weeks. We were feeling more grooved with the bent press, clean and jerk was coming along well with few problems and pull up and pistol training was really starting to take off thanks to the pistol progressions we were given by Senior RKC Franz Snideman (you can also youtube Doc Mark Cheng on his pistol progressions as well as they are both outstanding).

The very cool thing is that we really worked with a simplistic type of approach that you would see in Dan John’s 40 day workout program. We spent 2 days per week doing Level II skills, 1 day per week doing Level I skills, and 2 more days just getting in some swings.

Then we kind of ran into a wall training wise. We went off to CK-FMS for a wonderful weekend and the following week off to Net Profit Explosion’s Mega Training and Orlando HKC. During this time my skills began to start lacking. My tailbone would be sore from time to time as well. We got back from Orlando and were thinking of getting hard and heavy into training when we did a very smart thing, we FMS screened each other. The astonishing thing was is that we both scored a 12. This was a very kind way that my body was telling me I had some things to work on and to back off before I get an injury in training.

I feel that this was a very important lesson for me and for everyone reaching for a big fitness goal. There is a time to hit the pedal to the metal and a time to back off. As Master RKC Mark Reifkind states “the next step off of a peak is always down” & “tough guy periodization- Heavy, heavier, even heavier, INJURY, light, light, heavy…..” you get the idea. I feel a lot of this occurs not only within the RKC community when training for the RKC Level I and II (example: 1/2 bodyweight press for level II) but also in the health and fitness community as a whole. We never want to back off. We have to remind ourselves and our clients that we need to take ourselves in for an inspection and tune up every now and then and get back to basics.

So this past week I decided I would listen to my body and go back to some of the very basics: pistol progression from the beginning, deadlifts, body weight pull ups, and FMS correctives (mine was rolling patterns, scored 1/1). By the end of this past week my FMS improved by 3-4 points and now I am ready to get back into the training program. We were also fortunate enough that Master RKC Jeff O’Connor came in town to teach the Omaha HKC. The following day we hosted a mobility and stability workshop taught by the Red Neck Ninja himself and man was it fantastic. More information on how that went is upcoming.